Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Our pResident is an idiot

"In 1991, when my dad was president, he saw a threat, and that was that Saddam Hussein was going to overrun Kuwait," said Mr. Bush, who appeared relaxed and in good spirits at an Ask President Bush forum despite the generally negative reviews of his debate performance.

If Mr. Kerry's vote had carried the day, the president said, "Saddam would not only have been in his palaces, that means he would have been in Kuwait, as well."

So Clueless Leader knows even less about the first Gulf War than he does about the current one. And the NY Times doesn't bother to set the record straight, either. The fact is that by the time of the Senate vote on the first Gulf War, Saddam's army had already overrun Kuwait, due in large part to mexed missages delivered to him from Bush Sr. and Secretary of State James Baker via ambassador April Glaspie. While invading a sovereign nation is a clear and contemptible violation of international law, there was no way that Saddam could have predicted Bush 41's apoplectic reaction. Saddam had actually been encouraged by the U.S. government to attack Iran ten years earlier, and was supported by the U.S. during that war (although we were also supporting his enemy at the same time). In 1991, Saddam's troops were ensconced in Kuwait busily not throwing babies out of incubators and not massing on the Saudi border, despite what Poppy told us.

But apparently aWol has forgotten that one of his oft-repeated reasons for regime change in Iraq was that Saddam had attacked his neighbors, and had succeeded in occupying Kuwait. His dad didn't "see a threat" when Glaspie was instructed to say this:

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

AWol added today, "The policies of my opponent are dangerous for world peace," something with which I completely agree, but only inasmuch as they are practically the same as Bush's. Kerry's vote against the 1991 Gulf War was much better policy than anything he's offering now. And don't forget some of the people we seriously pissed off in that war, not the least of whom were Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden. And that war ended with Saddam brutally repressing Shiite and Kurdish uprisings while the US military watched, doing nothing.